Pages

About Me

I live and blog in Ann Arbor, Michigan. University of Michigan BA and MA from Eastern Michigan University. One term in the Michigan Army National Guard. The Institute of Land Warfare, Army magazine, Infantry Magazine, Military Review, Naval Institute Proceedings, and Joint Force Quarterly have published my occasional articles. See "Published Works" on the web version for citations.

The Undead Archives

My undead archives pre-Blogger were actually restored to life after Geocities sites went dark. Start at the old home page here.
If you find a link to the old site on the current site or old site, you should be able to replace the "g" in "geocities" with an "r" and make a good link.
Another archived site is here.
It replaces the ".com" with ".ws".
I hope to move all the older archives here (and started that project) but it is really tedious.

Tuesday, October 06, 2015

Times Are About to Get Interesting

The most disturbing aspect of China's island building in the South China Sea isn't the land itself or even the bases on them. It is the intent of China to use these islands to claim territorial waters and to claim benefits of an exclusive economic zone that are not based on international law. We will challenge this attempt.

The United States is preparing to maneuver naval warships and aircraft close to China’s artificial islands in the South China Sea, in what would be the Obama Administration’s toughest response yet to Beijing. Reportedly, the White House is readying plans to send warships within twelve nautical miles of several of the islands—a move that China claims would be an illegal violation of its sovereignty. Citing a U.N. treaty, the United States argues that man-made outposts cannot be construed as legitimate territory.

China wants to convert international waters into territorial waters, which would put China in control of valuable sea lanes, keep American military ships and aircraft out of those waters, and push out rival claimants to islands in the area.

So we will carry out Freedom of Navigation missions close to the artificial islands to show that we do not go along with China's unsupported claims of sovereignty.

Which is dangerous if China resists, as Khadaffi did a number of times in the 1980s when we crossed his so-called "line of death" in the Gulf of Sidra on similar missions.

We should be prepared to disable Chinese civilian vessels ordered by the Chinese government to ram or otherwise interfere with our missions. I doubt China would escalate to Coast Guard or even navy vessels, but you never know.

But if we don't do this, China gets their way and friends and allies will start moving away from us and toward China to accommodate the shift in power.

Remember, our basic objective isn't to deny China ownership of any particular island. We just insist that the issue of ownership be settled by negotiations rather than force (which in practice means we don't want China to attack other countries); and we don't want anybody who owns those islands to assert control of waters around those islands that exceed what international law allows--which keeps the South China Sea international waters.

"It's my sense that some nations view freedom of the seas as up for grabs, as something that can be taken down and redefined by domestic law or by reinterpreting international law," Swift told a maritime conference in Sydney.

"Some nations continue to impose superfluous warnings and restrictions on freedom of the seas in their exclusive economic zones and claim territorial water rights that are inconsistent with (the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea). This trend is particularly egregious in contested waters."

We'll see of our pivots away from Europe and the Middle East--and the resulting disorder as we tried to disengage--in order to pivot to the Pacific inspire China to back down or resist us.

Secretary Carter proclaimed that the U.S. “would fly, sail, and operate wherever international law allows” and noted that “turning an underwater rock into an airfield simply does not afford the rights of sovereignty or permit restrictions on international air or maritime transit.” In response, on August 11, Chinese Ambassador Zhao Jianhua brazenly asserted that “freedom of navigation does not mean to allow other countries to intrude into the airspace of the sea which is sovereign… no freedom of navigation for warships and airplanes.”

These are fundamentally different views and only one can prevail.

The author provides a useful description of the various land features and how they affect territorial water, airspace, and EEZs.

China said on Friday it would not stand for violations of its territorial waters in the name of freedom of navigation, as the United States considers sailing warships close to China's artificial islands in the South China Sea.

No American ship sent to challenge the illegal 12-mile limits around artificial islands should go alone. It should have plenty of backup nearby.

And we should have means short of force to keep Chinese non-military vessels away from our ship carrying out the challenge.

Heck, I'd put a sizable Marine contingent on whatever ship we send in case the Chinese try to board the vessel after disabling it by ramming or fouling the propellers.

So far that tipping point [of officials realizing that their personal safety requires them to stop stealing] has not been reached and popular anger continues to grow. The government had hoped that cultivating nationalism and creating “foreign threats” (usually the United States and Japan) would distract people. [It] does, but not often enough to slow the growth of corruption related unrest. Corruption is an everyday reality while foreign threats are far away and, for most Chinese, more a form of entertainment than an immediate threat.

Will the Chinese react to this by stopping corruption or by making the foreign threat seem a little more real by engineering a "safe" incident with one of the foreign devils?

StatCounter

Search This Blog

Note on site statistics: When I strip out the junk hits from Blogger statistics that seem to come and go in waves, I appear to have about 10,000 hits per month.

My old statistics package, Site Meter, seems to miss a lot and even disappears visits after they've appeared.

I just added a new StatCounter. So far it shows far fewer hits than Blogger and is more in line with Site Meter. But I suspect neither of the non-Blogger statistics register hits from social media. So I'm not sure what my audience size is. It is puzzling to me.

Of course, it is quite possible that my failure to use Facebook and Twitter has handicapped me in getting an audience. Or it may be an additional issue. I may be a blogosaur!